Anthropology

Most Topular Stories

In a previous post, I described the process of an ‘Ethnocharrette’ – essentially a strategy that incorporates aspects of design methodology into anthropological practice. As part of a longer series thinking about how art/design modalities are increasingly commonplace in anthropologies that aren’t designated as visual anthropology. I wondered if this attention to art and design in anthropology is ‘new’ or simply new to me given my recent collaboration with two artists? Is there something of a “visualisation of anthropology” underway? I discussed these questions with Keith M…

Two new papers in Nature and Science add to the debate on Native American origins. The first study (in Nature) detects that some Amazonians have a few percent ancestry from a group related to Australasians, which suggests that early native Americans were not homogeneous but came in two flavors: the main one found all over the Americans and the Australasian-related one. The second study (in Science) looks at ancient "Paleoamerican"-postulated populations and finds that they don't have any particular relationship to Australasians. Thus, whatever population brought the "Paleoamerican"…

Ludovic Coupaye, UCL Anthropology Over the last five years, undergraduate and postgraduate students enrolled in the course emphatically called “Transforming and Creating Worlds: Anthropological Perspectives on Techniques and Technology” have been given as a short assignment the recording of a short task of their choice and present it in the form of a Chaîne Opératoire. Originally developed by French anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, in the tradition of Marcel Mauss, and further developed by ethnographers such as Pierre Lemonnier, the Chaîne Opératoire is, ironically enough, more…

In a previous post, I described the process of an ‘Ethnocharrette’ – essentially a strategy that incorporates aspects of design methodology into anthropological practice. As part of a longer series thinking about how art/design modalities are increasingly commonplace in anthropologies that aren’t designated as visual anthropology. I wondered if this attention to art and design in anthropology is ‘new’ or simply new to me given my recent collaboration with two artists? Is there something of a “visualisation of anthropology” underway? I discussed these questions with Keith M…

[written with Luca Follis, Lancaster University] Activists who use technology to conduct political dissent – hacktivists – are increasingly threatened with investigation, prosecution and often disproportionately severe criminal sentences. For example, in January 2015 self-proclaimed Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown was sentenced to 63 months in prison for hacking-related activities including linking to leaked material online. Edward Snowden is currently exiled in Russia after leaking the global surveillance operations of the NSA and GCHQ. Prosecutions of hacktivists intensified in 2013,…

This essay by anthropologists Martin Manalansan and Ellen Moodie at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides an updated account of the fall-out from their institution’s un-hiring of Steven Salaita for his tweets critical of the state of Israel during its 2014 war on Gaza. It argues for a broader campaign against the revanchist state and neoliberalization of the university. “WAITING” IN THE NEOLIBERAL UNIVERSITY: The Salaita Case and the Wages of an Academic Boycott Martin F. Manalansan IV and Ellen Moodie** The crisis at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)…

In the 2002 rom-com About a Boy, Hugh Grant plays a well to do bachelor who lives off the royalties of a song his deceased father produced. With no need to work, Will Freeman (Grant) spends most of his time engaged in leisure pursuits: taking bubble baths, playing pool, getting scalp massages and looking for attractive women to rendezvous with. I can relate to the character. Not so much that I spend most of my time taking bubble baths and looking for attractive women (I do this only in moderation) but in that I live alone and have a flexible schedule. Like Freeman (Grant) I feel I need to…

We crave sincerity as much as scholarship -Micheal Jackson 2012: 175 How many dead people do you know on Facebook? I know three. Well, maybe two because one was aware that she was dying and took her page down. For the others, death was a surprise, even though in one case it was planned. Plans can be surprises of sorts. Many people worry that social media is changing the world for the worse. It is pretty common to hear people lament the lack of face to face communication these days or worry that people are ‘disconnected’ in the age of digital connection. I don’t worry about this. If the…

New research reveals that some of the earliest civilizations in the Middle East and the Fertile Crescent may have been affected by abrupt climate change. These findings show that while socio-economic factors were traditionally considered to shape ancient human societies in this region, the influence of abrupt climate change should not be underestimated.

New research has revealed abrupt warming, that closely resembles the rapid man-made warming occurring today, has repeatedly played a key role in mass extinction events of large animals, the megafauna, in Earth's past.

An international team of researchers compared the genomes of 31 living Native Americans, Siberians and people from Oceania with 23 ancient Native American genomes to establish a timeline for the arrival and spread of Amerindian populations. They concluded that the first Americans arrived after about 23,000 years ago and diverged around 13,000 years ago into two populations. They found no admixture of Polynesian or European genes, but did find some East Asian gene flow.

Native Americans living in the Amazon bear an unexpected genetic connection to indigenous people in Australasia, suggesting a previously unknown wave of migration to the Americas thousands of years ago, a new study has found.

Two new papers in Nature and Science add to the debate on Native American origins. The first study (in Nature) detects that some Amazonians have a few percent ancestry from a group related to Australasians, which suggests that early native Americans were not homogeneous but came in two flavors: the main one found all over the Americans and the Australasian-related one. The second study (in Science) looks at ancient "Paleoamerican"-postulated populations and finds that they don't have any particular relationship to Australasians. Thus, whatever population brought the "Paleoamerican"…

Related:British Origins (Leslie et al. 2015)bioRxiv http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/022723 Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history Stephan Schiffels, Wolfgang Haak, Pirita Paajanen, Bastien Llamas, Elizabeth Popescu, Louise Lou, Rachel Clarke, Alice Lyons, Richard Mortimer, Duncan Sayer, Chris Tyler-Smith, Alan Cooper, Richard Durbin British population history has been shaped by a series of immigrations and internal movements, including the early Anglo-Saxon migrations following the breakdown of the Roman administration after 410CE. It remains an open…

Genome Biol Evol (2015) 7 (7): 1940-1950. Phylogeographic Refinement and Large Scale Genotyping of Human Y Chromosome Haplogroup E Provide New Insights into the Dispersal of Early Pastoralists in the African Continent Beniamino Trombetta et al. Haplogroup E, defined by mutation M40, is the most common human Y chromosome clade within Africa. To increase the level of resolution of haplogroup E, we disclosed the phylogenetic relationships among 729 mutations found in 33 haplogroup DE Y-chromosomes sequenced at high coverage in previous studies. Additionally, we dissected the E-M35 subclade by…

European Journal of Human Genetics advance online publication 1 July 2015; doi: 10.1038/ejhg.2015.138 Shared language, diverging genetic histories: high-resolution analysis of Y-chromosome variability in Calabrian and Sicilian Arbereshe Stefania Sarno et al. The relationship between genetic and linguistic diversification in human populations has been often explored to interpret some specific issues in human history. The Albanian-speaking minorities of Sicily and Southern Italy (Arbereshe) constitute an important portion of the ethnolinguistic variability of Italy. Their linguistic isolation…

BMC Genetics 2015, 16:78 doi:10.1186/s12863-015-0237-5Analysis of ancient human mitochondrial DNA from the Xiaohe cemetery: insights into prehistoric population movements in the Tarim Basin, China Chunxiang Li et al.Abstract Background The Tarim Basin in western China, known for its amazingly well-preserved mummies, has been for thousands of years an important crossroad between the eastern and western parts of Eurasia. Despite its key position in communications and migration, and highly diverse peoples, languages and cultures, its prehistory is poorly understood. To shed light on the…

Ludovic Coupaye, UCL Anthropology Over the last five years, undergraduate and postgraduate students enrolled in the course emphatically called “Transforming and Creating Worlds: Anthropological Perspectives on Techniques and Technology” have been given as a short assignment the recording of a short task of their choice and present it in the form of a Chaîne Opératoire. Originally developed by French anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, in the tradition of Marcel Mauss, and further developed by ethnographers such as Pierre Lemonnier, the Chaîne Opératoire is, ironically enough, more…

Via Olav Velthuis, University of Amsterdam 28-30 January 2016, University of Amsterdam, Department of Sociology The aim of this multidisciplinary international conference is to bring together theoretical perspectives (ranging from sociology, anthropology, art history, economics and geography) that help advance our understanding of how art markets function, while offering high-level qualitative and quantitative empirical contributions to their local and global articulations. We particularly welcome contributions on emerging art markets in countries such as China, Russia, South Africa, Turkey,…

Faculty of Art, Design and Humanities On the retirement of Professor Elizabeth Edwards, applications are invited for the full-time, permanent post of Professor of Photographic History, based within the School of Humanities. The successful candidate will be appointed as the Director of the Photographic History Research Centre which was established in 2010 and is already widely acknowledged as a world-leading centre for the interdisciplinary study of the history of photography in all its aspects. He or she will also be expected to contribute to the broader development of History and of…

Anna Grimshaw, Emory University In 1960, Bill Coperthwaite bought 300 acres of wilderness in Machiasport, Maine. Influenced by the poetry of Emily Dickinson and by the back to the land movement of Scott and Helen Nearing, Bill Coperthwaite was committed to what he called“a handmade life.” For over fifty years until his death in 2013, he lived and worked in the forest. He was a builder of yurts, and a maker of spoons, bowls and chairs. I met Bill Coperthwaite not long after I bought a house in Machiasport. He was, of course, well-known to local people, many of whom affectionately…

The amateur film is becoming a global visual lingua franca, a consequence of the conjuncture of the digital with new and widely accessible film technologies (notably the camera phone) and new methods of distribution (open access video platforms, typified by YouTube). Amateur film now saturates online media discourse as well as personal and social media communication. Its ubiquity is one visible example of the current radical shift in media systems, whilst the films themselves are both reshaping the formal language of the moving image and refashioning the representation, mediation, and even…

Indian Country Today Media Network, July 23, 2015 Remains of more than 300 ancestors could soon return home, thanks to copy.5 million in grants awarded to 15 tribes and 16 museums under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Tribes received a total of 37 grants, the National Park Service (NPS) said, with the rest going to museums that will help identify, document

The Cortez Journal Park Ranger Lara Lloyd will present a thought-provoking talk about the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and how it impacts Mesa Verde on Thursday, July 30.The program, titled “Race, Science, and Burials: The Impacts of NAGPRA on Mesa Verde,” begins at 7 p.m. at the Far View Lodge in Mesa Verde National Park, and is free to the public.The passage of the

ECNS The 32 gold items came from tombs in Dabuzishan in Lixian County, Gansu Province. The tombs belonged to residents of Qin, one of the small kingdoms during the Spring and Autumn period (770 BC-476 BC) of Chinese history. In 221 BC, the king of Qin united China's kingdoms, founded the Qin Dynasty and became the country's first emperor.Gold ornaments may have been used to decorate coffins or

Press & DakotanJuly 19, 2015 Representatives of the South Dakota State Historical Society announce the return of South Dakota’s Great Sioux Horse Effigy to the Cultural Heritage Center in Pierre. The effigy was returned to the museum collection storage area of the Cultural Heritage Center. Immediate plans for redisplaying the effigy include a special Return Celebration Oct. 10-12 at the

On July 15, 2015 Recovering Voices will begin accepting Community Research Grant applications for 2016. Each year Recovering Voices, an initiative of the Smithsonian Institution, supports community scholars in their efforts towards language and knowledge reclamation and revitalization. 2016 will be no different. The purpose of the Community Research Grant program is to support indigenous

Here’s comes the second round of what you’ll find ‘In the Journals’ from July. For the Special Issue on HIV Criminalisation and Public Health in the latest edition of Critical Public Health, see this week’s earlier post. To start us off, the latest issue of Medical Anthropology focuses on ‘exploring bodies in Southern and East Africa.’ In their editorial, Emilie Venables and Lenore Manderson introduce articles that ‘examine how an analytical lens of corporeality can offer new ways to examine and understand linkages and dissonances between…

The capacity of individuals to imagine another’s perspective or personal agenda, and our own ability to feel anger, despondency or frustration in response to their pain and distress, has been singled out as something to consider in multiple stories and studies found on the web this month. Is empathy a choice, or something less conscious? Is it always a good thing, or do some situations challenge our empathetic nature? This month’s roundup highlights pieces found around the web in which this question is tackled. Empathy is normally thought of as being a positive quality to have, however a…

In her superb exposition of staring, Garland-Thomson (2009) draws attention to Chris Rush’s artistic piece Swim 2 which depicts a woman with Down’s syndrome in a regal pose (figure 1). Figure 1: ‘Swim 2’ by Chris Rush. All rights reserved. She continues: The portrait invites us to stare, engrossed perhaps less with the “strangeness” of this woman’s disability and more with the strangeness of witnessing such dignity in a face that marks a life we have learned to imagine as unliveable and unworthy, as the kind of person we routinely detect in advance through medical technology and…

This series aims to get anthropologists and closely-related others talking seriously, and thinking practically, about how to synergize biological and social scientific approaches to human health and well-being, and to what positive ends. In this interview, Bill Dressler responds to questions posed by series organizer Jeffrey G. Snodgrass. How and why might cultural anthropologists and social scientists interested in health benefit from integrating biological variables/biomarkers into their research and analysis? Outcomes. What I mean is that anthropological analyses are full of…

I’m perplexed by cultural anthropology’s antagonism toward biology, with culture and biology more typically treated as providing alternate and competing, rather than complementary and synergistic, explanations for human functioning. This is particularly strange to me—a practicing cultural anthropologist with a background in molecular biology—when even medical anthropologists fail to account for the role biology plays in shaping human health. Wouldn’t such a consideration enrich our comprehension of the interplay between sociocultural milieus and human bodies? “Biocultural”…

Photo and text borrowed from The Japan Times, 7/28/15: Controversial artist Makoto Aida is refusing to bow to demands that he alter a politically sensitive submission to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo after museum chiefs and Tokyo Metropolitan Government officials deemed it unsuitable for children. Aida, whose previous work includes pictures of naked schoolgirls on leashes and Japanese fighter planes attacking New York, was invited with his family to submit an installation for an exhibition entitled “An Art Exhibition for Children — Whose Place is this?” which runs at MOT from…

New content on Japan Focus by Phillip Seaton: AbstractIn April 2015, Peace Osaka, a publicly-funded museum famous for its hard-hitting exhibits about Japan’s wars of the 1930s and 1940s, reopened after a “renewal”. In the new exhibits, discussion of Japanese aggression and atrocities has been completely removed and the stance of the museum has changed from progressive to conservative. Based on a photographic record of the pre- and post-“renewal” exhibits, this essay discusses in what ways and why Peace Osaka has changed under three headings: physical conversion, mission conversion…

Some recent interesting articles to make one wonder about the priorities (and even common sense) of Japanese lawmakers... Ban on possession of child porn takes effect in JapanFrom The Japan Times, 7/15/15: Japan finally moved to ban the possession of pornographic photos and videos of children on Wednesday, amid growing international criticism as the only Group of Seven industrialized country that had not passed a law on the matter. After the Diet amended the law on punishment of activities relating to child prostitution and child pornography, the revised law took effect on July 15 last year.

Call for Documentaries Deadline for submission: December 20, 2015About the ProjectSoutheast Asia is rich in its diversity of ethnic, religious and cultural composition. The region has maintained the coexistence of such diversity while at the same time achieving economic progress and becoming a hub for the flow of people, goods, money and information. Yet at present, the region is also confronted with serious issues such as the decrease of biodiversity and tropical forests, disasters, pandemics, aging population, ethnic and religious conflicts, economic differentiation and poverty. In the face…

From Japan Today, 7/8/15: Two JR companies plan to install more security cameras on their shinkansen (bullet trains), following the suicide by fire of a 71-year-old man in a bullet train between Shin-Yokohama and Odawara stations on June 30. A 52-year-old woman also died of smoke asphyxiation in the incident, which was the first time that a fire has occurred on the shinkansen trains since they began running in 1964. JR Tokai and JR West said they will install two new security cameras inside each car to cover the aisles and interiors, Fuji TV reported. Currently, security cameras are installed…

In Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2015, 3, a really useful open access collection of review papers on state of the art research on social behavior edited by Molly Crockett and Amy Cuddy. From their introduction: “Social interactions shape and reflect who we are, influence what we do, and profoundly affect our wellbeing. The past decade has seen dramatic advances in our understanding of the neural underpinnings and real-world outcomes of social behavior. Here, we bring together a stellar collection of papers addressing current and pressing issues in the study of social behavior. We…

From mid-June to mid-July 2015, the ICCI website has hosted a Book Club devoted to Thom Scott-Phillips’ book, Speaking Our Mind. The book has received positive reviews in various media, including the Times Literary Supplement (read Richard Moore's review here), and has been called "an amazing job" (Stuart West),“the most important and best book ever written on the evolution of language” (Dan Sperber). The participants were: Thom Scott-Phillips (with a précis of his book)Alberto Acerbi (his post) Clark Barrett (his post) Bart de Boer (his post) Greg Bryant (his post) Mathieu…

This is an excellent book. I cannot think of another on this topic that matches its clarity, concision, accessibility, comprehensiveness, and argumentative rigor. I’m quite amazed that Scott-Phillips has managed to combine such seemingly antithetical virtues in one work. The discussion is also admirably honest: Scott-Phillips owns up to the obvious weaknesses with the view and offers strong responses.I am a little embarrassed and anxious, therefore, because I disagree with most of the main theses of the book. Not all of them. Scott-Phillips persuades me that pure code theories of language…

I am writing this while conducting fieldwork in Zambia, with only very limited access to the internet. Therefore, I could not read already existing posts and the corresponding responses and discussions, and some of the issues I will refer to might have been raised by others already. However, as a researcher interested in the gestural and facial communication of great apes, I want to offer some comments and facts from a comparative perspective on human communication and language evolution. As a more general comment, I specifically liked the way Thom Scott-Phillips navigates the reader through…

First of all, thanks to Thom for his excellent book. I agree completely that pragmatics has been under-represented in discussions of the evolution of language (with the notable exceptions you mention). I was, I recall, the only pragmaticist speaking at Evolang in Paris in 2001. I recall also that I was advised in the strongest possible terms not to go by a certain person: he knows who he is, but shall remain nameless! Thanks also to Tiffany and Olivier, and to cognitionandculture.net, for inviting me to participate.As someone whose interest in relevance theory has come via linguistics, rather…

Extract from Monterde, A. and J. Postill 2014. Mobile ensembles: The uses of mobile phones for social protest by Spain’s indignados. In G. Goggin and L. Hjorth (eds.) Routledge Companion to Mobile Media. London: Routledge, 429-438. […] This broad overview of the mobiles for activism and protest literature reveals four main areas of theorisation in need of further development. First, the specific affordances of different mobile technologies matter and should not be subsumed under general notions such as ‘new media’ or ‘digital media’. As we saw with the English riots, the low…

by Will Balmford Research assistant Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC) School of Media and Communication RMIT University Melbourne, Australia After a successful first session of the Digital Ethnography Reading Group (DERG) it is time to starting thinking about our next one. The August session of the group will be held on Wednesday 12 August (12-1:30pm, in Building 9, Level 2, Room 9, RMIT City Campus, – the meeting room next to the HDR Space). […] This month’s reading is the Introduction and Chapter 5 of Coleman, G. (2014). Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The…

by Allister Hill PhD candidate Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC) RMIT University, Melbourne Last week, on 9 July 2015, the Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC) ran its first monthly reading group. It was, by all accounts, a success. Intimate enough to allow everyone the chance to readily participate, with a little under 10 people going, John Postill (as the resident academic guru) and myself were facilitating. As you can see from last week’s post, the introductory reading, Horst, Hjorth & Tacchi (2012). ‘Rethinking ethnography’, was chosen to centre the discussion on…

By Allister Hill PhD candidate Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC) RMIT University, Melbourne Due to scheduling clashes, this month we are running the first group Thursday 9 July 2015, 12-1:30pm, Room 9.3.5A/B [RMIT city campus, Melbourne]. Moving forward they will be run on the second Wednesday of each month, starting on 12 August 2015 (12-1:30pm). See also the meeting invite. As this is the first session we’d like you to think about some of the following. What ethnography means to you and to your research? How does your understanding of ethnography shape your practices as a…

Educating ‘bilingual’ children in Spain and Denmark: childhood bilingualism as opportunity or constraint by Kenn Nakata Steffensen University College Cork/University of Tokyo See PDF The word ‘bilingual’ has acquired vastly divergent politicised meanings in contemporary Spanish and Danish discourses on childhood education. In the former, it tends to denote competence in a foreign language, which is almost universally assumed to be English, while in the latter it refers to relative lack of competence in Danish. The two conceptions of ‘bilingualism’ as an opportunity or constraint…

ABSTRACT ObjectivesAnalyses of hominine forelimb diaphyseal structure typically employ sections located at midshaft. This study addresses three questions. First, how accurately must midshaft be defined to yield comparable data? Second, does variation in midshaft location due to alternative definitions fall within error ranges such that data gathered using different length measurements are comparable? Third, do error ranges and length metric effects differ between elements or taxa such that certain bones or species are more prone to issues of comparability? Materials and MethodsHumeri, radii,…

ABSTRACT ObjectiveThe widespread use of three-dimensional digitization means that models of whole bone geometry are routinely captured for many applications in virtual anthropology. In this article, we test whether a geometric morphometric (GMM) approach can be used to accurately quantify directional bilateral asymmetry in cross-sectional shape using virtual bone models. MethodsWe introduce a method to (1) orient virtual long bone models and extract cross sections and (2) collect GMM landmarks to analyze cross-sectional shape. Landmark data, captured using polar radii, were analyzed for an…

ABSTRACT ObjectivesA new procedure for skeletal sex estimation based on humeral and femoral dimensions is presented, based on skeletons from the United States. The approach specifically addresses the problem that arises from a lack of variance homogeneity between the sexes, taking into account prior information about the sample's sex ratio, if known. Material and methodsThree measurements useful for estimating the sex of adult skeletons, the humeral and femoral head diameters and the humeral epicondylar breadth, were collected from 258 Americans born between 1893 and 1980 who died within the…

ABSTRACT ObjectiveHydration status is critical to physiological and cognitive health, yet it is unclear how populations living in hot-humid environments experiencing lifestyle transitions manage this underexplored facet of heat adaptation. This study assesses the predictors of repeated measures of hydration status for adults from two villages (close and distant from a market town) in the Bolivian Amazon. Materials and MethodsInterviews and focal follows were conducted with 36 Tsimane’ (50% male). Urine samples, temperature, activity levels, and anthropometrics were measured pre-interview…

Science DOI: 10.1126/science.aab3884 Genomic evidence for the Pleistocene and recent population history of Native Americans Raghavan, Maanasa, Matthias Steinrücken, Kelley Harris, Stephan Schiffels, Simon Rasmussen, Michael DeGiorgio, Anders Albrechtsen, …Eske Willerslev. How and when the Americas were populated remains contentious. Using ancient and modern genome-wide data, we find that the ancestors of all present-day Native Americans, including Athabascans and Amerindians, entered the Americas as a single migration wave from Siberia no earlier than 23 thousand years ago (KYA), and…

Nature Communications 6, no. 7717 (2015) doi:10.1038/ncomms8717 The Evolution of Human and Ape Hand Proportions Almecija, Sergio, Jeroen B. Smaers, and William L. Jungers. Human hands are distinguished from apes by possessing longer thumbs relative to fingers. However, this simple ape-human dichotomy fails to provide an adequate framework for testing competing hypotheses of human evolution and for reconstructing the morphology of the last common ancestor (LCA) of humans and chimpanzees. We inspect human and ape hand-length proportions using phylogenetically informed morphometric analyses and…

A street fight is raging on (here and here) in the Russian academe between scientists and pseudoscientists. It’s increasingly difficult to tease apart the former from the latter. It’s all one bloody mess. It appears the most recent comments of an independent observer such as myself just got deleted from the queue. Usually they get delayed with a note : “your post is awaiting moderation” but now they simply got deleted (see below). The same happened to my post with a critique of Borinskaia’s new “demolition” of Klyosov (see below). Needless to…

Apologies to my English-only readership. This post is in Russian and represents my responses to an ongoing web war between academic and entrepreneurial scientists in Russia. A large, multidisciplinary group of prominent Russian academics headed by geneticist Elena Balanovsky published a “resolution” in a web magazine of popular science entitled “Troitskii variant” condemning what they perceive to be dangerous pseudoscience in the writings of a biochemist and DNA-genealogist Anatole Klyosov and his co-authors. The resolution came on the heels of a journalistic…

In this Thursday, July 23, 2015 photo, Brooke Wendling and Danielle Silverman look for a building foundation at an archaeological dig at Lake George Battlefield Park in Lake George, N.Y. (AP Photo/Mike Groll) The Associated Press LAKE GEORGE, N.Y. — Jul 31, 2015, 3:24 AM ET By CHRIS CAROLA Associated Press An archaeological project has returned to an artifact-rich state park in the southern Adirondacks on what was the focal point of the warring British and French empires more than 250 years ago. A team of students and volunteers is trying to determine if a low stone wall along the edge of…

Israeli, Lithuanian and American researchers have tracked down the remains of the Great Synagogue of Vilna. A Ground Penetrating Radar survey conducted in June 2015 in Vilnius, Lithuania has uncovered the underground remains of the Great Synagogue and Shulhof of Vilna, now lying partially below a modern school. These important remnants of what was before the Holocaust, Lithuania’s greatest synagogue, will be exposed in an excavation to commence next year. The magnificent Great Synagogue of Vilna (Vilnius) in Lithuania, was the oldest and most significant monument of Litvak Jewry. Sadly,…

Setting up the core in multi sensor core logger (MSCL) at the paleoceanography lab at the Rosenstiel School, to make a high-resolution image and measure the physical properties such as density and magnetic susceptibility. Credit: Diana Udel, UM Rosenstiel School Communications Office Effects of climate on human societies Date: July 23, 2015 Source: University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science Summary:New research reveals that some of the earliest civilizations in the Middle East and the Fertile Crescent may have been affected by abrupt climate change. These…

Public Release: 22-Jul-2015 International collaboration uncovers proof of earliest small-scale agricultural cultivation Source: American Friends of Tel Aviv University Until now, researchers believed farming was “invented” some 12,000 years ago in the Cradle of Civilization — Iraq, the Levant, parts of Turkey and Iran — an area that was home to some of the earliest known human civilizations. A new discovery by an international collaboration of researchers from Tel Aviv University, Harvard University, Bar-Ilan University, and the University of Haifa offers the first…

Ancient Assyrian tablets, dictating social arrangements including women’s rights, dating back to 4,000 years have been excavated in the Central Anatolian province of Kayseri. (Photo courtesy: DHA) From Staff writer, Al Arabiya News Friday, 17 July 2015 Ancient Assyrian tablets, dictating social arrangements including women’s rights, dating back to 4,000 years have been excavated in the Central Anatolian province of Kayseri, a local newspaper reported Thursday. Prof. Fikri Kulakoğlu of Ankara University told Doğan News Agency that the Kultepe-Kanis-Karum trade colony site where the…